Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
Groundwater is also increasingly relied upon by growing cities
and thirsty farms, and it plays an important role in the future
sustainability of California’s overall water supply. In an
average year, roughly 40 percent of California’s water supply
comes from groundwater.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 with the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires local
and regional agencies to develop and implement sustainable
groundwater management plans with the state as the backstop.
While high-profile surface-water initiatives like WaterFix and
the Delta Conveyance Project grab most of the headlines
pertaining to water management in the state, efforts to make
significant changes to the way groundwater is utilized have
been underway since 2014. Now, the state and the local water
agencies are seeking public comment on documents related to the
management of groundwater. In 2014, then-Gov. Jerry Brown
signed a three-bill legislative package collectively known as
the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to better
manage groundwater supplies over the long term.
California was the first U.S. state to legally recognize access
to safe, clean and affordable water as a human right. But
substantial parts of the state lack access to drinking water
that meets those criteria. A new study published by the
California State Water Board and supported by UCLA research
identifies a risk for failure among a significant portion of
the state’s small and medium-sized public water systems.
As the latest evidence of extended drought and extreme wildfire
danger confirms, California’s climate is changing quickly. Its
policy on burning planet-warming fuels — not so much. A
state Senate bill to ban hydraulic fracturing and otherwise
restrict oil and gas extraction died in its first committee
Tuesday, with Gov. Gavin Newsom and three Democratic lawmakers
withholding support.
Santa Barbara County’s most depleted water basin, the Cuyama
Valley, is fast becoming the latest battleground in the fight
over how — and whether — to address the negative impacts of the
lucrative cannabis industry on farming and residential
communities. The giant groundwater basin underlying this
sparsely populated, heavily farmed, economically depressed
valley is one of California’s 21 most critically over-drafted
basins and the only one outside the Central Valley.
The state plans to inspect three dairy ranches in the Point
Reyes National Seashore after independent water quality tests
conducted in nearby creeks and lagoons earlier this year found
E. coli bacteria concentrations up to 40 times higher than
state health standards. The San Francisco Regional Water
Quality Control Board plans to inspect Kehoe Dairy, McClure
Dairy and R&J McClelland Dairy, which are located near
Kehoe Creek and waterways that flow into Abbotts Lagoon in the
northern region of the national seashore.
A far-reaching proposal to outlaw hydraulic fracturing and ban
oil and gas wells from operating near homes, schools and
healthcare facilities failed in the California Legislature on
Tuesday, a major setback for progressive leaders who hail the
state as the nation’s bellwether on environmental protection.
Gov. Gavin Newsom in September called on state lawmakers to ban
fracking and voiced his support for safety buffer zones around
wells …
A new state analysis estimates a $4.6 billion funding gap for
water system infrastructure needed to ensure Californians have
access to safe and affordable drinking water. The State Water
Resources Control Board this month released the first-ever
drinking water needs assessment, showing that approximately 620
public water systems and 80,000 domestic wells are at-risk of
failing to provide a sufficient amount of drinking water that
meets basic health standards.
Advocates, such as the Colorado Water Trust, a nonprofit that
spearheaded the new approach, say the tools can be used as
templates across other river basins, where older water rights
are already spoken for. … Across Colorado nearly 40,000
miles of streams flow year-round and, as a result, have the
potential to receive protection under the state’s Instream Flow
Program.
There’s just one week left to register for our Water 101
Workshop, which offers a primer on the things you need to know
to understand California water. One of our most popular events,
this once-a-year workshop will be held as an engaging online
event on the afternoons of Thursday, April 22 and Friday,
April 23.
The San Joaquin Valley’s quest for groundwater sustainability
will result in large amounts of irrigated agricultural lands
being retired. A new book explores how some of these lands
could be restored to natural areas that bring multiple
benefits. We talked to Scott Butterfield, a senior scientist at
The Nature Conservancy and one of the book’s editors, about
this vision.
CITIZENS for a SUSTAINABLE HUMBOLDT (CSH) and the NORTHCOAST
ENVIRONMENTAL CENTER (NEC) have filed a lawsuit in the Humboldt
County Superior Court, with claims under the California
Environmental Quality, the State Planning and Zoning Law, and
other laws, challenging the environmental review and permits
approved by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors.
It’s that time of year, when we find out it’s that kind of
year. We appear at the doorstep of a “critically dry
year,” and most reservoir levels are significantly below
average. Those conditions bring painfully to mind the awful
drought years of 2014 and 2015, and threaten water supplies for
California farms and cities, and for the protected fish species
that must also get by in these lean years. -Written by Danny Merkley, director of water resources, and
Chris Scheuring, senior counsel for the California Farm
Bureau.
The Suisun Marsh — known as the largest swath of contiguous
wetlands on the West Coast and a haven for thousands of
migrating waterfowl — has become the Bay Area’s latest
battleground between fossil fuel producers and
environmentalists hellbent on fighting climate change. A
Brentwood company, Sunset Exploration Inc., announced in
January it wants to explore for natural gas by drilling a
section of the 116,000-acre marshland about 9 miles southwest
of Suisun City in an area known as Hunter’s Point, according to
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The State Water Resources Control Board announced the
completion of its first-ever comprehensive look at California
water systems that are struggling to provide safe drinking
water to communities and how to help them. With criteria for
the state’s Human Right to Water list recently expanded, the
assessment identifies both failing water systems and those at
risk of failing, offering the most indepth view of long-term
drinking water safety the state has ever had.
Salinity has often become a major limit for irrigated
agriculture in semi-arid regions, from ancient Mesopotamia to
parts of California today. A previous blog post showed that
conjunctive use with more saline groundwater can differ
fundamentally from freshwater aquifers. Higher salinity limits
groundwater use for irrigation during dry years, when less
surface water is available to dilute groundwater salinity, and
increases aquifer pumping in wetter years to avoid
water-logging. Brackish groundwater can no longer serves as
drought storage, but becomes a supplemental water supply in all
years, limited by availability of fresh surface water for
diluting salts. This greatly reduces groundwater’s ability to
support permanent crops and increases variability in annual
crop acreage across different water years, thus reducing
profit.
Despite its green reputation, California has a big fossil fuel
problem on its hands: neighborhood oil and gas drilling. In
California, there’s nothing preventing frackers or drillers
from setting up shop right next to your home, school, or
hospital — and indeed, this is the reality for 7.4 million
Californians currently living within 1 mile of oil and gas
drilling operations, who are disproportionately non-white and
low-income. Now, a new state bill called S.B. 467, slated
for a hearing in the California Senate Committee on Natural
Resources and Water on Tuesday, may reshape the lives of
frontline communities by eliminating fracking and instituting
mandatory buffer zones between oil and gas extraction and
places where Californians live, work, and study.
Another legal challenge has been launched against a project by
downtown-based water infrastructure company Cadiz Inc. to pump
and transport water from its desert aquifer to connect with
existing water conveyance systems. This latest lawsuit was
filed March 23 against the Bureau of Land Management by the
Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice and the Sierra
Club. It asks the federal court to overturn a December BLM
decision to approve the conversion of an idle oil and gas
pipeline to carry water from Cadiz’s desert aquifer. Cadiz is
not a direct party to the lawsuit but would be impacted by a
decision resulting from the suit. The filing marks the third
decade in which Cadiz’ water transfer plan has faced legal
challenges from environmental groups.
Nearly every resident of California has experienced an
earthquake. Even the youngest schoolchildren have the safety
procedure drilled into them: duck under a table, hold on, and
pray that it’s only a small one. Barring a truly catastrophic
quake, the situation usually ends there. You go on with your
day as if nothing had happened, the near catastrophe completely
forgotten. Most people assume that the danger ends after the
last remnants of the tremor share the ground. But there is a
much more sinister side effect of earthquakes that affects
daily life around California and much of the rest of the world:
contaminating the groundwater supply.
Throughout 2020 and early 2021, California issued more than 300
permits to oil and gas companies for new underground injection
wells — an intensive form of oil production and wastewater
disposal. But the actual number of new injection wells is
likely higher, owing to the state’s opaque approval process
that has drawn scrutiny from auditors and environmentalists.
Some of these undercounted wells may be polluting groundwater
used for public drinking and agricultural purposes, according
to regulatory filings reviewed by Capital & Main. The impact of
injection wells on groundwater in California is understudied,
regulators say.
Groundwater is a key resource for water users in California’s
Central Valley, a major agricultural hub with an economic
output of tens of billions of dollars annually. Surface
deformation in the Central Valley has long been linked to
changes in groundwater storage, but the timing and movement of
water flow beneath the surface has been poorly understood due
to a lack of reliable data. Now, for the first time,
scientists at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and School of Global Policy and
Strategy, as well as the U.S. Geological Survey are using
advanced satellite data to map the “pulse” of groundwater flow
through the San Joaquin Valley, the southern portion of the
Central Valley.
Despite market unknowns created by the pandemic and lower
commodity prices, California agricultural land values remained
largely stable, an indication buyers have confidence in the
long-term land market in the state: This was a key takeaway
from a virtual business conference held by the California
Chapter of the American Society of Farm Managers and Rural
Appraisers. The conference also discussed impacts of the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act on California land
values. Even though record supplies of the state’s
highest-value crops led to lower prices for farmers last year,
appraisers said the softer prices also helped move those
products.
While California’s landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act promised comprehensive protection of the state’s
groundwater, significant gaps remain in its coverage. The
Department of Water Resources now has an opportunity to reduce
or eliminate those gaps and should seize the moment. We know
all Californians will experience another year of water
shortages and warmer, drier conditions that will require
conservation and which are likely to fuel destructive wildfires
in our forests and around our communities. We are all in this
together. Groundwater is critical for California, particularly
in dry years when it provides up to 60% of the water supply for
farms and people.
-Written by Jeanette Howard, director of The
Nature Conservancy’s freshwater science team; Melissa M.
Rohde, a groundwater scientist at The Nature Conservancy;
and Barton H. Thompson, senior fellow of the Woods Institute
for the Environment, and faculty director of Water in the West
at Stanford University.
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has marked
2021 as the third-driest water year, a period marked from
October to March, on record for the Golden State, potentially
setting up another deadly wildfire season after last year’s
record setting blazes. The department’s annual snow survey
released this month recorded precipitation levels at 50 percent
the annual average for the water year. The dry conditions
can also be seen in the state’s water supply, with the
department reporting that California’s major reservoirs are at
just 50 percent of overall capacity.
Rural water users are panicking over a proposal to create a
market for the sale and purchase of water rights in Nevada,
unconvinced by arguments that the concept would encourage
conservation. Lawmakers on Monday weighed whether so-called
“water banking” would be preferable to prevailing water law
doctrines that govern surface and groundwater rights disputes
in the driest state in the U.S. A legislative hearing about two
proposals to allow water rights holders to sell their
entitlements pitted state water bureaucrats against a coalition
of farmers, conservationists and rural officials.
California is at the edge of another protracted drought, just a
few years after one of the worst dry spells in state history
left poor and rural communities without well water, triggered
major water restrictions in cities, forced farmers to idle
their fields, killed millions of trees, and fueled devastating
megafires. … Just four years since the state’s last
drought emergency, experts and advocates say the state isn’t
ready to cope with what could be months and possibly years of
drought to come.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom voiced his support last year for a ban
on hydraulic fracturing by oil and gas companies, an effort
long fought by the industry and trade unions alike, he gave
Democrats a green light to send him legislation to achieve that
goal as they saw fit. But the crackdown on oil and gas
production under consideration by the California Legislature is
much wider in scope than the plan requested by the governor,
who may get more than he bargained for as he shoulders the
pressures of carrying out the state’s COVID-19 pandemic
response while battling a looming recall election. The
ambitious proposal would outlaw hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, and a series of other oil extraction methods reviled
by environmental activists.
Water covers 71% of the earth’s surface, but only about 3%
percent of it is fresh water, making it the planet’s most
precious resource. But what do you do when water is in danger
of going dry? California’s Central Valley is no stranger
to drought, and because of that, farmers and scientists are
joining forces to figure out how to get by with less.
Although most residents have safe drinking water, more than 250
water systems serving 900,000 people were out of compliance
with drinking water standards in 2020. This is a chronic issue
for some systems; more than 170 have been out of compliance for
three or more years. More than half of these noncompliant
systems are in the San Joaquin Valley—California’s largest
farming region and home to a third of the state’s low-income
communities. Some tribal water systems face similar challenges.
Data are lacking on water quality provided by roughly 1,500
very small, county-regulated water systems and more than
350,000 domestic wells, but some of these supplies may have
chronic issues as well.
Underneath Orange County is a hidden arterial highway that
groundwater moves through before eventually finding its way
into homes. More than 70% of the water served in Orange County
is from groundwater. But some of that water has become
contaminated from industrial manufacturing when harmful
chemicals that weren’t properly disposed of seeped down into
the ground. … The Orange County Water District is tasked
with determining the extent of the pollution, and containing it
before more drinking water wells need to be shut down and
contaminants spread to the principal aquifer, which is directly
pumped by production wells for drinking water.
Seven agencies that have been working together to sustain the
groundwater in the Cosumnes Subbasin, which includes the
communities of Galt, Herald, Wilton and Rancho Murieta South,
held a workshop March 24. The presentation was intended to help
residents understand how groundwater will be used in the next
two decades in the Cosumnes Subbasin. The group has until Jan.
31, 2022 to submit its plan to the state on how it intends to
meet its target of replacing 20,000-acre feet per year (AFY) in
underground basins called aquifers to sustain the groundwater.
One of the takeaways from meeting is the plan will cost $2.25
million in the early years.
Rejecting arguments that a utility can’t be sued over
century-old pollution, a federal judge signaled Wednesday that
he will likely advance a lawsuit seeking to hold Pacific Gas
and Electric liable for contamination that occurred more than
100 years ago. … [Plaintiff and San Francisco resident Dan]
Clarke claimed groundwater contamination stemming from the site
of PG&E’s former gas plant “is intermittently discharged
into the bay.” He said seasonal, tidal and other factors result
in groundwater passing the former plant site and intermixing
with contaminants before leaking into the San Francisco Bay.
Drought is returning to California as a second, consecutive
parched winter draws to a close in the usually wet north,
leaving the state’s major reservoirs half empty. But this
latest period of prolonged dryness will probably play out very
differently across this vast state. In Northern
California, areas dependent on local supplies, such as Sonoma
County, could be the hardest-hit. Central Valley growers have
been told of steep cuts to upcoming water deliveries.
Environmentalists too are warning of grave harm to native
fish. Yet, hundreds of miles to the south, the
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California reports
record amounts of reserves — enough to carry the state’s most
populous region through this year and even next.
A groundwater market, which caps total pumping within one or
more basins, allocates portions of the total to individual
users and allows users to buy and sell groundwater under the
total cap, is a promising tool for basins implementing
California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA). … [G]roundwater markets can be a useful tool for
achieving basin sustainability, but they are not a good fit for
every basin or groundwater sustainability agency (GSA). … The
Fox Canyon groundwater market benefitted from the four enabling
conditions (water scarcity, fixed allocations, agricultural
stakeholder support, and capacity and funding) described below.
On its face, SGMA appears to promise comprehensive groundwater
management. The legislature sought to “provide for the
sustainable management of groundwater basins”. SGMA therefore
“applies to all groundwater basins in the state”…. DWR has
ranked only 18 percent (94 out of 515) of Bulletin 118
groundwater basins as medium or high priority, although these
basins account for virtually all of current groundwater pumping
in the state. The result is a fragmented regulatory system that
leaves significant gaps in the sustainable management of
California’s groundwater.
When it comes to water in the West, a lot of it is visible.
Snow stacks up high in the mountains then eventually melts and
flows down into valleys. It’s easy to see how heavy rains and
rushing rivers translate into an abundance of available water.
But another important factor of water availability is much
harder to see. Beneath the surface, the amount of moisture
held in the ground can play a big role in how much water makes
it down to rivers and reservoirs – and eventually into the
pipes that feed homes and businesses. Elise Osenga is a
community science manager for the Aspen Global Change Institute
– a nonprofit focused on expanding scientific understanding of
climate change.
Arizona’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act established pumping
regulations in the state’s most populous areas but set no such
limits on rural parts of the state. In recent years, some rural
areas have come under increased pressure from agricultural
pumping that has dropped groundwater levels dramatically. …
Lawmakers introduced several bills in the current legislative
session to regulate or provide more options for managing the
state’s groundwater. One would have banned most new wells in
the Upper San Pedro and Verde Valley river basins. Another
would have set spacing limits for new wells in areas that are
overdrawn. Another, introduced by Rep. Regina Cobb of Kingman,
would have given county supervisors the power to establish
groundwater limits or regulations in their area.
Much like when tech money reshapes an historical neighborhood,
a beaver’s move downtown can cause the locals to worry. In
Napa, the animals’ sprawling waterfront complexes create
worrying pools along the riverbank, while the native
cottonwoods are whittled down and threaten landowners’ roofs.
It seems destined that two species known for their
environmental engineering would struggle to live in unison.
However, municipalities like Napa and Martinez in Contra Costa
County have learned to live with their beavers, and the
upcoming California Beaver Summit aims to set the record
straight.
Over the coming decades, California’s San Joaquin Valley will
transition to sustainable groundwater management under the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), ensuring
reliable groundwater supplies for generations to come.
Sustainable groundwater management and a changing climate will
inevitably affect how land is used on a sweeping scale. By some
estimates, the amount of farmland that will have to be taken
out of production to balance groundwater demand and supply is
equivalent to the size of Yosemite National Park — a transition
that could serve a huge blow to the agricultural economy, rural
communities and the environment.
Last week, the Court of Appeal for the Fifth Appellate District
of California issued a long-awaited decision in the Antelope
Valley Groundwater Cases, resolving a dispute more than two
decades in the making. The case adjudicated groundwater rights
in the Antelope Valley Adjudication Area (AVAA) in northern Los
Angeles County and southeast Kern County. The adjudication,
which commenced in 1999, involved private water suppliers,
public agencies, the federal government, and overlying
landowners who pump water for agricultural, industrial,
commercial, and domestic uses. Although currently unpublished,
the court’s opinion illustrates several important developments
in California groundwater law.
As California’s seasons become warmer and drier, state
officials are pondering whether the water rights permitting
system needs revising to better reflect the reality of climate
change’s effect on the timing and volume of the state’s water
supply. A report by the State Water Resources Control Board
recommends that new water rights permits be tailored to
California’s increasingly volatile hydrology and be adaptable
enough to ensure water exists to meet an applicant’s
demand.
The city is getting ready to impose new penalties for water
customers who exceed their rations during St. Helena’s Phase II
water emergency. On Tuesday the City Council told staff to
bring the recommended penalties back for adoption at the April
13 council meeting. The new penalties would take effect May 1.
Meanwhile, city officials will develop clear conservation
targets and look at adjusting the city’s water management
policies, including how water allocations are calculated.
As California’s seasons become
warmer and drier, state officials are pondering whether the water
rights permitting system needs revising to better reflect the
reality of climate change’s effect on the timing and volume of
the state’s water supply.
A report by the State Water Resources Control Board recommends
that new water rights permits be tailored to California’s
increasingly volatile hydrology and be adaptable enough to ensure
water exists to meet an applicant’s demand. And it warns
that the increasingly whiplash nature of California’s changing
climate could require existing rights holders to curtail
diversions more often and in more watersheds — or open
opportunities to grab more water in climate-induced floods.
Many of the wetlands in the western United States have
disappeared since the 1700s. California has lost an astonishing
90 percent of its wetlands, which includes streamsides, wet
meadows and ponds. In Nevada, Idaho and Colorado, more than 50
percent of wetlands have vanished. Precious wet habitats now
make up just 2 percent of the arid West — and those remaining
wet places are struggling. Nearly half of U.S. streams are in
poor condition, unable to fully sustain wildlife and people,
says Jeremy Maestas, a sagebrush ecosystem specialist with the
NRCS who organized that workshop on Wilde’s ranch in 2016. As
communities in the American West face increasing water
shortages, more frequent and larger wildfires and unpredictable
floods, restoring ailing waterways is becoming a necessity.
The Water and Land Use Series of videos is now available in
Hmong as well as English and Spanish. The videos provide
insight on how the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA) is taking shape. PhD Candidate at UC Merced, Vicky
Espinoza has been working on the videos for several months. The
series is available on the YouTube Channel CaliWaterAg.
The goal of the project has been to make SGMA information more
accessible and encourage more engagement from community
members.
A California Court of Appeal recently issued two opinions
affirming a physical solution limiting the right to pump
groundwater by a landowner who has never pumped from the
groundwater basin or who has not established the amount or
reasonableness of pumping. A landowner filed the underlying
lawsuit in 1999 to quiet title to its claimed superior
groundwater rights in a groundwater basin that had been in a
state of overdraft for decades. The lawsuit became a
comprehensive groundwater adjudication involving approximately
70,000 landowners in the Antelope Valley area of California,
including two separate classes and the United States.
Most Californians rely on groundwater in some way, through the
kitchen faucet, when buying food, or at a green local park to
relax and recreate. Those underground aquifers are even more
important during droughts. In California’s Southern San Joaquin
Valley, groundwater pumping more than tripled in the 2012-2016
drought to make up for lost rain. But that over-pumping comes
at a cost, causing land to sink as much as two feet a year,
damaging bridges, roads, and houses, and drying up drinking
water wells and rivers. The people and places most hurt are the
ones without the money to drill down to find diminishing
groundwater.
As a result of increasing demand for water, exacerbated by the
decades-long drought in the Colorado River system, the Colorado
State Engineer is considering a proposal that would impose
stricter limitations on the permitting of new groundwater wells
in the Yampa River Basin upstream of where the Yampa River
meets the Little Snake River. The Yampa River flows west
from its headwaters near Steamboat Springs, in northwest
Colorado. After it is joined by the Little Snake River,
it flows to meet the Green River near the Colorado-Utah state
line. From there, the Green River flows south as a major
tributary of the Colorado River.
Starting Monday, March 22, groundwater users who own property
in the Santa Rosa Plain area will have an opportunity to review
and update their water use information. The new Groundwater
User Information Data Exchange (GUIDE) Program is being
launched by the Santa Rosa Plain Groundwater Sustainability
Agency (GSA) to improve understanding of how groundwater is
used, and the number and types of water wells in the Santa Rosa
Plain basin.
A new lawsuit brought by environmental groups against the
Bureau of Land Management seeks to rescind leases for seven
parcels of federal land auctioned to energy companies in the
waning days of the Trump administration. They are the first
federal land oil and gas leases of their kind to be sold in
nearly a decade and would open vast tracts to oil exploration
and fracking. The land in question sits in California’s Central
Valley, an agricultural region that already experiences some of
the worst air and water quality in the country.
According to USGS, 56 percent of streams sampled had one or
more pesticides in water that exceeded at least one
aquatic-life federal standard. Many of these pesticides are
also linked to a range of human and environmental health
effects including cancer, birth defects, neurological and
reproductive health impacts. … [A] report released by UC
Davis examined the the four-county Tulare Lake Basin and the
Monterey County portion of the Salinas Valley. The study found
that … agricultural fertilizers and animal wastes applied to
cropland are by far the largest regional sources of nitrate in
groundwater; nitrate loading reductions are possible, some at
modest cost. Large reductions of nitrate loads to groundwater
can have substantial economic cost…
In 2020 wildfires ravaged more than 10 million acres of land
across California, Oregon and Washington, making it the largest
fire season in modern history. Across the country, hurricanes
over Atlantic waters yielded a record-breaking number of
storms. While two very different kinds of natural disasters,
scientists say they were spurred by a common catalyst – climate
change – and that both also threaten drinking water supplies.
As the nation already wrestles with water shortages,
contamination and aging infrastructure, experts warn more
frequent supercharged climate-induced events will exacerbate
the pressing issue of safe drinking water.
Nitrogen pollution is one of agriculture’s biggest and most
intractable problems. Crops can’t grow without the critical
nutrient, and because sources of nitrogen are easy to come
by—synthetic fertilizer is cheap and manure from large animal
agriculture operations is plentiful—farmers often apply too
much, to try to ensure the highest yields. Because plants can’t
use it all, the excess makes its way into groundwater and
washes into waterways where it contaminates drinking water and
creates vast dead zones in oceans and lakes.
… California’s largest hotspot unsurprisingly includes
21 counties that cover the Central Valley, America’s produce
capital.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management decided to sell oil and gas
leases on public land in California for the first time in
nearly a decade without taking a hard look at the environmental
and public health impacts, according to a lawsuit filed Monday
in a federal court in the state. The agency’s “hasty”
environmental review ignored comments from experts and failed
to consider evidence showing fracking could pollute already
scarce groundwater resources, environmental groups say in the
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California
filing. The decision violated the National Environmental Policy
Act …
In an effort to address drought and increase local groundwater
supply, the Santa Clara County Valley Water District is
fast-tracking a plan to purify and recycle more water in San
Jose. … But city elected leaders — concerned for the
environment and limited staff resources due to COVID-19 — are
pumping the brakes and want more time to negotiate.
Councilmembers met Friday with Valley Water’s board of
directors for a special meeting to hash out the issue.
Under an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), the USDA Forest Service closed 77 large-capacity
cesspools (LCCs) it operated in Arizona and California. The
Forest Service met the deadlines set forth in the agreement and
closed the cesspools, which can be sources of harmful water
pollution, in 11 national forests across the two states.
… Cesspools collect and release untreated raw sewage
into the ground, where disease-causing pathogens and harmful
chemicals can contaminate groundwater and surface waters that
are sources of drinking water.
[A] study has ascertained that indiscriminate exploitation
of groundwater is resulting in sinking of land worldwide. …
According to a report by The Guardian, countries like India,
China and Mexico are rapidly draining groundwater to meet their
food demands. Agriculture is at the forefront of excessive
exploitation of groundwater. … In California, USA, where
80% of pure water is used for irrigation of cultivated crops,
about one million acres of agricultural land is used for
growing alfalfa as a fodder crop, which is exported to China.
An article in the New York Times has expressed concern that the
US exports one billion gallons of water to China as alfalfa per
year.
Tucked out of sight, oil wells run thousands of feet deep,
tapping thick crude from one of California’s many urban oil
fields. And in the fall of 2019, investigators with the state’s
oil agency flagged trouble. Nasco Petroleum was injecting
huge amounts of water into well bores above the legal pressure
limits, aiming to push more crude out of the aging downtown
field. … The wells, investigators wrote in a report to a
manager, posed “immediate” risks to drinking water aquifers.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has announced that Westlands
Water District was awarded a $1,609,000 grant from
Reclamation’s WaterSMART Fiscal Year 2021 Water and Energy
Efficiency Grant Program. The grant was awarded to fund
the District’s Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Project,
which will retrofit 760 manually read groundwater well meters
with advanced, automated metering devices that can transmit
data over a regional network. By ensuring even greater water
metering precision and eliminating the need to manually read
the meters, the project is expected to save nearly 103 billion
gallons of water and reduce 5.3 metric tons of carbon emission
over 20 years.
Two local water agencies are moving forward with plans to fully
develop a groundwater banking project near Newman. The
groundwater recharge project has exceeded expectations in pilot
studies, said Jarrett Martin, general manager of the Central
California Irrigation District and Anthea Hansen, general
manager of the Del Puerto Water District. They said plans are
in the works to expand the 20-acre pilot project to an 80-acre
recharge zone. Martin said the two agencies have been awarded
grants totaling $6.4 million to expand the recharge project to
its full buildout, which is envisioned at 80 acres.
When a region’s groundwater is critically depleted and its dirt
as hard as a frying pan, how do you refill the aquifer? Ask a
fifth grader. Actually, ask the fifth and sixth grade
combination class at Bakersfield’s Munsey Elementary School
taught by Barbara Elrod. Elrod’s students discovered a pretty
cool way to both conserve water and recharge aquifers through
“grey water.” That’s water from sinks, showers and washing
machines. Turns out most of that water has soap in it and soap
is a surfactant.
The construction of 8 miles of water pipeline that will be
integral to the Pure Water Soquel project, was approved by
Soquel Creek Water District Board of Directors this week. The
Santa Cruz Mid-County Groundwater Basin, from which at least
50,000 residents depend on for drinking water, has been deemed
critically depleted by the state. Years of intensive pumping
for agriculture and drinking water has drawn out more water
from the aquifer than is being replenished naturally by
rainwater. That’s led to seawater seeping into underground
storage and wells. The Pure Water project aims to bolster
groundwater levels in the aquifer, and prevent seawater
contamination, which has already been detected in some areas.
After 22 years of litigation, a California appellate court has
affirmed a trial court judgment defining groundwater pumping
rights for thousands of landowners plus cities, water districts
and Edwards Air Force Base in the Antelope Valley desert north
of Los Angeles. The March 16, 2021 opinion by the Fifth
District Court of Appeal is one of three recent opinions
rejecting challenges to a 2015 trial court judgment declaring
groundwater rights and imposing a “physical solution” to reduce
pumping and to ensure sustainability of the Antelope Valley’s
largest single source of water supply.
California landowners who haven’t been continuously pumping
from a depleted groundwater basin have lower priority rights
compared with entities that have continually pumped in recent
decades, a California state appeals court has said in a
first-of-its-kind ruling.
In the latest effort to protect Coyote Valley, a Palo Alto
environmental group has closed three deals totaling $16.5
million to purchase 331 acres in the scenic expanse of rural
land on San Jose’s southern edges … The three properties
purchased in the most recent deals, left undeveloped, also will
be used to provide natural flood protection for downtown San
Jose. The idea is that when Coyote Creek is flooding, as it did
in 2017, causing $100 million in damage, its waters can be
deliberately spread over the open area to seep into the
groundwater table instead of all rushing downtown into
neighborhoods.
An estimated 4.1 million people in the lower 48 states are
potentially exposed to arsenic levels that exceed EPA’s
drinking water standards A new U.S. Geological Survey study
highlights the importance of homeowners testing their well
water to ensure it is safe for consumption, particularly in
drought-prone areas. … The states with the largest
populations facing elevated arsenic levels in private domestic
well water during the simulated drought conditions are Ohio
(approximately 374,000 people), Michigan (320,000 people),
Indiana (267,000 people), Texas (200,000 people) and California
(196,000 people).
The interplay between surface water and groundwater is often
overlooked by those who use this vital resource due to the
difficulty of studying it. Assistant professors Scott Jasechko
and Debra Perrone, of UC Santa Barbara, and their colleagues
leveraged their enormous database of groundwater measurements
to investigate the interaction between these related resources.
Their results, published in Nature, indicate that many more
rivers across the United States may be leaking water into the
ground than previously realized.
The Kiewit-Stantec design-build team recently broke ground on
two multi-year projects that together total $400 million and
will help remediate water from the San Fernando Valley
Groundwater Basin (SFB) for the Los Angeles Department of Water
and Power (LADWP). The SFB covers 226 square miles northwest of
downtown Los Angeles. The new state-of-the-art facilities at
the North Hollywood Central Response Action Treatment Facility
and Tujunga Well Field Response Action Treatment Facility will
address historical groundwater contamination from post WWII and
cold-war era industrial operations in the area.
Longtime family farmer Laura Cattani was appointed to the board
of the powerful Kern County Water Agency during a special
meeting on Monday. She is the second woman to serve on the
board of directors in the 60-year history of the agency.
Cattani will bring much needed diversity to the board, several
directors said during Monday’s meeting, not only because she’s
a woman, but also for her age. Cattani is 39.
The shadow of a controversial plan to pipe groundwater from
rural Nevada to Las Vegas looms as state lawmakers weigh two
proposals to protect groves of swamp cedar trees considered
sacred on Monday. Until last year when the Southern Nevada
Water Authority decided to “indefinitely defer” its pursuit of
permits, the trees were caught in the crossfire of fights over
development and conservation.
As a scholar, my work is situated at the intersection of
climate change, public health, and public policy. I am an
interdisciplinary researcher, and my interests are centered on
environmental justice….During California’s last extreme
drought, I was doing my field work and visited East
Porterville, which was ground zero for how water injustice was
hitting migrant communities, particularly undocumented Latino
migrants. They had very little water, and what they had was
often contaminated.
Pacific Gas and Electric will pay to remove soil possibly
tainted by century-old gas plants and investigate groundwater
contamination in a San Francisco shoreline area under the terms
of a deal announced Monday. The agreement represents the third
and final settlement reached in a lawsuit filed in 2014 over
pollution from manufactured gas plants operated by PG&E in
the late 1800s and early 1900s. Under the deal entered Monday,
PG&E will fund a study on how to remove or mitigate
contamination from an underground storage tank on the former
site of its North Beach gas plant, which stopped operating
after it was damaged in the Great Earthquake of 1906.
Groundwater aquifers are best understood and managed locally;
therefore, the key to successfully implementing SGMA lies in
maintaining local control, something Farm Bureau vigorously
advocates. In addition, we have stressed that to reduce
dependence on groundwater, we must expand surface water storage
and recharge our groundwater aquifers when excess water is
available….Unless March somehow makes up for the lack of rain
and snow thus far this winter, we could see an increased
dependence on groundwater this growing season.
This online short course offered through UC Davis and other
organizations will be held May 6, 13, 20, 27, and June
3 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
PDT with Q&A sessions from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.
PDT. It will review the fundamental principles of
groundwater and watershed hydrology, water budgets, water
quality, and water law and regulation in an intuitive, highly
accessible fashion.
Through real world examples, participants learn about the most
common tools for measuring, monitoring, and assessing groundwater
and surface water resources. The course will then review the key
steps and elements of planning for groundwater sustainability.
The Water Education Foundation is a cooperating organization for
this online course.
The San Joaquin Valley has begun to grapple with implementing
the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). Figuring out
the math of balancing water supply and demand in ways that
cause the least economic harm to farmers and local economies is
challenging, and difficult tradeoffs are inevitable. We talked
with Emmy Cattani, a fifth-generation farmer from Kern County,
about some options.
It was a chilly morning in 2010 when Oxnard farmworkers,
tending to their broccoli crops, discovered an oily sheen
floating on their irrigation water. In a nearby oilfield, a
tank of diluent — a carcinogenic mix of benzene, toluene, and
diesel — had sprung a leak. … A decade later, we
still face the same dangers. Right in the heart of our prime
farmland, which infuses Ventura County with over two billion
dollars annually. We’re risking that vital economy for the
dregs: Tar Sands becomes bunker fuel and asphalt — not
gasoline. And annually, Tar Sands extraction in Oxnard could
use up approximately 12 Olympic-size swimming pools worth of
drinkable water — just to make steam. -Written by Liz Beall, executive director of Climate First:
Replacing Oil and Gas.
Many people in Grass Valley, Calif., live and work over the
Idaho-Maryland Mine without realizing it. A lot of information
about the location of the two surface sites and the project
features has been circulated, but not much has been shared
about the sheer size of the project underground and how that
may affect us. … Wells are of even greater concern. Due
to dewatering of the mine, there will be lowering of the ground
water levels in the area.
The Western US is in the midst of yet another dangerous dry
spell. The drought has been building over the past year, and
since November, a greater stretch of the West has been in the
most severe category of drought than at any time in the 20
years that the National Drought Mitigation Center has been
keeping records. … Ryan Jensen saw the impacts of
California’s last major drought firsthand while working for the
Community Water Center in the San Joaquin Valley. When
residential wells ran dry, students had to shower in their
school locker rooms. To keep toilets running, some rural
households relied on hoses slung over fences from their
neighbors.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) released the draft
California’s Groundwater – Update 2020, containing information
on the condition of the state’s groundwater, which is
especially important as California faces a critically dry water
year. DWR encourages community members and water managers to
review the publication and provide input.
Climate change and other environmental pressures are already
putting the pinch on water resources in California, the
Southwest and other arid parts of the world. Over-tapped
groundwater, rivers and lakes are forcing water managers to
find new supplies. Some of these can be costly, like treating
wastewater for drinking water. Or they can come with a hefty
price tag and outsized environmental footprint, like
desalination or new dams. There’s another option on the
table, though: stormwater. If we do the accounting right,
runoff from precipitation is a cost-effective supplementary
water resource, experts say.
Environmental and community groups have sued a California
county after the prime oil-drilling region approved a plan to
fast-track thousands of new wells in a state that’s positioned
itself as a leader in combating climate change. The Kern County
Board of Supervisors on Monday approved a revised ordinance
that could lead to approval of more than 40,000 new oil and gas
wells over roughly 15 years. … The oil and gas industry
faces challenges from California lawmakers and environmental
groups for creating air and water pollution and contributing to
climate change.
As we celebrate National Groundwater Awareness Week, the
Northern California Water Association (NCWA) convened its
groundwater management task force this week to help coordinate
the various Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) in the
Sacramento Valley and to advance groundwater sustainability
throughout the region.
Learn from top water experts at our annual Water 101
Workshop about the history, hydrology and law behind
California water as well as hot topics such as water equity,
the Delta and flows, new federal administration and
more. This year’s workshop, set for April 22-23, will be held
virtually and feature a presentation devoted
solely to groundwater.
When an oil or gas well reaches the end of its lifespan, it
must be plugged. If it isn’t, the well might leak toxic
chemicals into groundwater and spew methane, carbon dioxide and
other pollutants into the atmosphere for years on end.
… There are nearly 60,000 unplugged wells in Colorado in
need of this treatment — each costing $140,000 on average,
according to the Carbon Tracker, a climate think tank, in a new
report that analyzes oil and gas permitting data. Plugging this
many wells will cost a lot —more than $8 billion, the report
found.
California’s Governor broke new ground this year when he
committed to “transition away from harmful pesticides.” His
budget proposal to update fees charged on pesticide sales would
generate new funding that could be used to offer better
protections for farm workers, agricultural communities, and
vulnerable ecosystems, as well as help farmers adopt more
sustainable practices. … Pesticides remain a
widespread drinking water contaminant, particularly in
rural areas, and exposure to these pesticides has
been linked to increased vulnerability to COVID-19.
Proposed water wells in California don’t all require
environmental review under state and local permit laws, but
state standards governing well location will sometimes require
local governments to make discretionary decisions, triggering
such a look, a state appellate court said. The California
Environmental Quality Act requires discretionary
decisions—those that require an agency to exercise judgment in
deciding whether to approve a project—to undergo an
environmental review.
The Bureau of Reclamation announced the selection of Semitropic
Water Storage District and Bard Water District as the two
recipients of the Agricultural Water Use Efficiency Grant
Program for fiscal year 2020. Combined with Natural Resources
Conservation Service support and local cost-share
contributions, approximately $5 million in water efficiency
improvement projects will be implemented during the next two
years. The AWUE program works with NRCS to promote
district-level improvements to increase on-farm water use
efficiency and conservation projects. Reclamation is funding
the two projects with NRCS support.
A plan to fast-track drilling of thousands of new oil and gas
wells over the next 15 years in California’s prime oil patch
was approved Monday by Kern County officials over objections by
environmental groups….The ordinance came up for discussion as
the industry faces challenges from lawmakers as well as
ever-present opposition from environmental groups for creating
air and water pollution and significant contributions to
climate change.
In times of drought, California’s Central Valley is full of
farmers hindered by the lack of water. And this region, where
the bulk of the nation’s fruits and vegetables are cultivated,
is driving up the demand for water. Although many farmers
without easy access to water often buy and pump it in from
their neighbors, droughts often fuel massive price increases.
And this often makes water so cost-prohibitive that it can
discourage farmers from even planting crops. This predicament
led a firm to recently list water as the newest commodity on
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Now, water futures are traded
daily. This helps farmers lock in a price for water, so they
have a cushion if a drought threatens their crop revenues.
Salinity is an eventual threat to agriculture and groundwater
sustainability in parts of California, and other irrigated
parts of the world. Irrigation, lower groundwater levels, and
natural conditions have dramatically increased groundwater
salinity in parts of California over the last 150 years. Nearly
two million tons of salt accumulates per year in the San
Joaquin Valley (CV-SALTS), where 250,000 acres of irrigated
land have been fallowed, 1.5 million acres are potentially
salt-impaired (Great Valley Center 2005), with $1.2 – $2.2
billion/year losses by 2030 without management.
After a state appeals court blocked Kern County’s effort to
speed up new oil and gas drilling, officials overseeing the
state’s prime oil patch have revised an ordinance that could
permit tens of thousands of new wells over the next 15 years.
The Kern County Board of Supervisors is poised to vote Monday
on the plan that would streamline the permitting process by
creating a blanket environmental impact report for drilling as
many as 2,700 wells a year. … The county hasn’t
been able to issue permits in a year and the industry is facing
challenges from lawmakers as well as environmental groups for
creating air and water pollution and for significant
contributions to climate change.
[A] new 18-chapter book, written by agricultural economists at
UC Davis, UC Berkeley and UC Riverside, addresses issues such
as labor, water, climate and trade that affect all of
California agriculture. … Water, climate and trade pose
challenges and opportunities for California agriculture. In the
last decade, water scarcity and decreased water quality, along
with regulations to address these issues like the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act, have prompted farmers to use scarce
water to irrigate more valuable crops, as with the switch from
cotton to almonds.
California’s legislative session came to a wild ending in 2020
when the clock ran out on major bills. Key pieces of
environmental legislation were among those that died on the
floor, and conservationists are hoping 2021 brings a different
story….Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, [proposed
a climate resiliency bond that] would include $240 million for
Salton Sea restoration, $250 million for groundwater management
and $300 million for grants for clean and reliable drinking
water.
When Malini Ranganathan, PhD, an associate professor at
American University and interim faculty director of the
Antiracist Research and Policy Center, conducted research in
Exeter, a flourishing agriculture town in California’s Central
Valley, she didn’t expect to see similar conditions to what
she’d witnessed in India’s low-income housing areas. Residents
in one of the world’s richest states were depending on bore
water and water tankers to drink because tap water was
unsafe.
One of the first two Native American women to be elected to
Congress, Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) is well on her way to being
confirmed as the first Native American to serve as secretary of
the Interior. Last week, Haaland went before the U.S.
Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for her
confirmation hearing in which she answered questions for two
days. Today the committee will host a business meeting to
consider the nomination of Haaland and members can vote in
person or by proxy.
A part of the natural water cycle, groundwater is an important
element of California’s water supply, especially in the Central
Valley, where one in four people rely on it entirely. It is an
especially important resource in the Solano Subbasin, a
geographic area that includes Dixon, parts of Vacaville,
Elmira, Rio Vista, unincorporated Winters, Davis, the Montezuma
Hills, Isleton, Sherman Island and Walnut Grove. And every
quarter, the Solano Subbasin Groundwater Sustainability Agency
Collaborative, aka the Solano Collaborative, hosts a Community
Advisory Committee meeting and will so again from 3 to 5 p.m.
Wednesday.
Water may be life, but most residents of Southern California do
not often reflect on the complex series of canals, pumps, and
pipelines that connect where they live to water sources like
the Colorado River, the Sierras, or the numerous water basins
under LA County. Even less appreciated is the role water
districts play in combining water sources, treating our water,
and distributing it. Major water districts influence water
quality and rates. They decide how to meet future water needs
in an era of drought and climate change. These agencies
determine if your water comes from sustainable local sources
like conservation and recycling or from desert-damaging water
mining projects like Cadiz.
Southern California’s unarmored three-spine stickleback has
made headlines periodically, most recently over a lawsuit that
was filed on Jan. 18 by the Center for Biological
Diversity against the Trump Administration for allegedly
failing to take measures to protect the endangered fish. What
is the three-spine stickleback and what is going on with the
fish? … The unarmored three-spine stickleback was listed
as endangered in 1970 under the precursor to today’s Endangered
Species Act. Critical habitat was proposed for the species by
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1980, but never
designated.
While the county’s Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) has
been monitoring groundwater through residential and commercial
wells volunteered for the program since 2017, four new wells
specifically designed to capture a broad range of information
will soon be expanding the available data. The Sonoma Valley
Fire District approved the installation of the first of four
new groundwater monitoring wells on a small piece of their
property on Felder Road, just off Arnold Drive. It is expected
to be producing results by this year.
An invisible line splits the rural road of Avenue 416 in
California’s Tulare county, at the point where the nut trees
stretch east toward the towering Sierra Nevada mountains in the
distance. On one side of the line, residents have clean water.
On the other side, they do not. On the other side lies East
Orosi, an unincorporated community of about 700 where children
grow up learning to never open their eyes or mouths while they
shower. They know that what comes out of their faucets may harm
them, and parents warn they must not swallow when they brush
their teeth. They spend their lives sustaining themselves on
bottled water while just one mile down Avenue 416, the same
children they go to school with in the community of Orosi can
drink from their taps freely and bathe without a second
thought.
The organization River Partners teamed up with California State
Parks and Butte County Resource Conservation District on
Thursday to host a flood plain restoration and
reforestation event. The event was called the
Bidwell-Sacramento River State Park Riparian Restoration
Project and was held near the Pine Creek Access point of the
Sacramento River in Chico.
The Eureka City Council is set to consider a letter from the
mayor to the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, a
subdivision of the California Environmental Protection Agency,
regarding a potential water contamination hazard. The letter is
on the agenda for the March 2 meeting as a consent calendar
item.
The Water Replenishment District of Southern California (WRD)
is the largest groundwater agency in the State of California,
managing and protecting local groundwater resources for over
four million residents. WRD’s service area covers a
420-square-mile region of southern Los Angeles County, the most
populated county in the United States. The 43 cities in the
service area, including a portion of the City of Los Angeles,
use about 215,000 acre-feet (70 billion gallons) of groundwater
annually which accounts for about half of the region’s potable
water supply.
For centuries, farmers have found ingenious ways of making the
best of the water available, but access to fresh water is
becoming more and more unpredictable. Extreme weather events
and drought is as much of a threat, as flash flooding in farms
and food producers. … In California’s Central
Valley, a region that produces a quarter of the USA’s food and
relies mostly on water pumped from underground, to irrigate the
crops, is fast running out of its water supply.
The Santa Cruz City Council is poised to approve a 5-year
extension between the City and Soquel Creek Water Districts on
a pilot program that would funnel excess surface water to
Soquel Creek during winter months, in hopes of bolstering
overdrawn groundwater supply there. That surface water, on
average, is projected to be around 115 million gallons
delivered by Santa Cruz Water to Soquel Creek during the wet
season, which would take strain off pumping the Santa Cruz
Mid-County Groundwater Basin.
The McMullin Area Groundwater Sustainability Agency (MAGSA), a
Groundwater Sustainability Agency in the Central Valley’s Kings
Subbasin, has been awarded a $10 million grant by the State
Water Resources Control Board through the Prop 1 Stormwater
Grant Program to expand the existing McMullin On-Farm Recharge
(OFR) Project located near Helm in Fresno County. The
Project is identified in MAGSA’s Groundwater Sustainability
Plan and is a key element in a vision developed by MAGSA to
achieve groundwater sustainability under California’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) through
innovative approaches in groundwater banking and crediting.
The Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency has extended its public
comment period for the Saugus Formation Aquifer to March 19,
with the addition of a second virtual public meeting. The
meeting is expected to provide community members with an
additional opportunity to learn more about how the agency is
keeping its water safe for drinking water consumption through
minimizing and reducing the public health and environmental
effects of hazardous substances that have been identified in
the aquifer, as well as treatments that could allow several
wells to return to service.
Lower groundwater levels can prevent drainage of water and
salts from a basin and increase aquifer salinity that
eventually renders the groundwater unsuitable for use as
drinking water or irrigation without expensive desalination.
Pauloo et al. (2021) demonstrate this process for the
Tulare Lake Basin (TLB) of California’s Central Valley. Even if
groundwater pumping does not cause overdraft, it can cause
hydrologic basin closure leading to progressive salinization
that will not cease until the basin is opened by allowing
natural or engineered exits for groundwater and dissolved salt.
The process, “Anthropogenic Basin Closure and Groundwater
Salinization (ABCSAL)”, is driven by human water
management.
New legislation would ban all fracking in California by 2027,
taking aim at the powerful oil and gas industry in a state
already planning to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars
by 2035. … Environmental groups say [fracking] can cause
significant harm to air quality and water supplies.
A large Canada-based utility service company has unveiled a
proposal to construct and operate a Moss Landing desalination
plant using brackish water from wells at the mouth of the
Salinas Valley. According to a Jan. 28 presentation by Liberty
Utilities official Kim Adamson, the proposal calls for a desal
plant capable of producing up to 32,000 acre-feet of drinking
water per year at a cost of about $1,000 to $1,500 per
acre-foot for Salinas, Castroville and Marina, and perhaps even
eventually the Monterey Peninsula.
The Long Beach Water Department approved an agreement this
month to acquire two properties near an existing well site in
West Long Beach as it aims to build a new potable water
treatment facility that would treat groundwater there.
Water futures and groundwater trading was the central focus of
the most recent meeting of the California State Board of Food
and Agriculture. Several panelists and speakers weighed in on
how a water trade system like that would impact farmers and
ranchers.
A major water banking proposal northwest of Bakersfield that
won coveted Proposition 1 funding in 2018, was hit by two
lawsuits earlier this month, one claiming it is nothing more
than a wolf in sheep’s clothing intent on selling Kern River
water to southern California. The City of Bakersfield and
the Kern County Water Agency filed separate complaints Feb. 2
against the Kern Fan Groundwater Storage Project seeking to
have the project’s recently approved environmental impact
report deemed inadequate. …
The City of St. Helena has agreed to monitor local groundwater
levels and stream flows, averting a potential lawsuit from an
environmental advocacy group. Following months of negotiations,
the city and Water Audit California released a joint statement
Friday announcing the city will collect monthly water levels
and annual extraction totals for local wells and provide a
public, “scientifically useful” summary of the data. The city
will conduct a comprehensive review of its water system,
develop new protocols for using the city’s own Stonebridge
wells, and work with Water Audit on the installation of new
stream gauges along the Napa River, York Creek and Sulphur
Creek.
The Kern County Farm Bureau issued a “call to action” this week
asking local growers and ranchers to participate in a series of
upcoming meetings that will influence the role California’s
agricultural lands will be expected to play, or continue to
play, in fighting climate change.
On sunbaked farmlands where alfalfa and corn grow alongside
pistachio orchards and grapevines, pumps hum as wells draw
water from underground and send it flowing to fields. The
agriculture business around Willcox depends entirely on
groundwater. And groundwater here, like most other rural areas
across Arizona, remains entirely unregulated.
Tools such a SWIIM–which stands for Sustainable Water and
Innovative Irrigation Management–provides a new standard in
water measurement that allows growers to receive an accurate
accounting of the water both delivered and consumed by their
orchards. … And, of course we are talking about SGMA, the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
California is in the early stages of a severe multi-decadal
drought, exacerbated by the climate crisis. As Dan Walters
pointed out in his recent commentary, we must move quickly to
prepare for water shortages and wildfires. A potent strategy to
improve the state’s water storage capacity involves an ancient
technology so ubiquitous that it is often overlooked: soil. The
urgency of California’s drought and wildfire risks require that
we invest in soil health now. -Written by Ellie Cohen, CEO of The Climate
Center, and Torri Estrada, executive director of
the Carbon Cycle Institute.
Water makes the world go ‘round, and a major player in
California’s breadbasket doesn’t want to part with more than
they have already. The city of Bakersfield, and the Kern County
Water Agency are suing nearby water districts over their plan
to skim water from Kern County sources for transport to other
parts of the state — water that county officials say they need
for themselves. The Kern Fan Groundwater Storage Project is a
$246 million dollar water storage project planned for
California’s south San Joaquin Valley.
As long as people have lived in Pasadena, water has been an
essential element for the life-style, health and economy of our
region. Now, however, Pasadena faces a severe water crisis.
This never has been an easy need to resolve, but population,
growth and climate change have made the development of a
sustainable or resilient water program an even greater
necessity for the future. It’s not just a challenge
for Pasadena, but also for all of California, and even the
nation. -Written by Tim Brick, the Managing Director of the Arroyo
Seco Foundation.
An organic food company has committed $750,000 to studying a
sustainable farming strategy in the Sacramento Valley.
Cascadian Farm, a manufacturer of cereal, granola, granola bars
and frozen vegetables, announced the partnership with The
Nature Conservancy last week. The money will fund a trial on a
strategy that could turn working farmland into wildlife
habitat, regenerate groundwater and reduce flood risk.
A new study shows petroleum-related and other gases
present in groundwater overlying an oil field on the
Oxnard Plain, as well as unanswered questions about gases
in five water wells, but no widespread
contamination of the water supply. State and county
officials said they are reviewing the 66-page report by
scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey before determining
what, if any, future actions should be taken. The study
confirmed what scientists suspected two years ago after
finding petroleum-related gases in water wells but adds
new details.
Moving from competition to cooperation can help solve water
problems facing farms in the San Joaquin Valley and cities in
Southern California, and better prepare both for a changing
climate. At a virtual event last week, PPIC research fellow
Alvar Escriva-Bou summarized a new PPIC report showing how
cooperative investments in new supplies and water-sharing
agreements can help address both regions’ needs.
For many Bay Area residents who live near the water’s edge,
little-publicized research indicates groundwater rising beneath
their feet could start to manifest in 10-15 years, particularly
in low-lying communities like Oakland. And that could resurface
toxic substances that have lingered for years underground.
Cascadian Farm, a pioneering brand in the organic movement,
announced its commitment of $750,000 to The Nature Conservancy
to help rebuild farmland in California’s Sacramento Valley. The
two-year investment will focus on partnering with farmers to
rebuild wildlife habitat and regenerate groundwater on more
than 25 million square feet, equal to 600 acres of farmland, in
this key sourcing region for the brand.
Marina Coast Water District is small but influential in local
water issues, caught in the middle on various politically
fraught issues. For one, the water district—which is
adjacent to California American Water’s service area, but not
in it—has long been an antagonist to Cal Am. The one-time
partners on a now-defunct desalination project have been
embroiled in litigation over that former project for years. And
Marina Coast has been an outspoken leader in opposition to Cal
Am’s more recent proposed desalination project, fighting it
since the earliest steps.
Across a sprawling corner of southern Tulare County snug
against the Sierra Nevada, a bounty of navel oranges, grapes,
pistachios, hay and other crops sprout from the loam and clay
of the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater helps keep these
orchards, vineyards and fields vibrant and supports a
multibillion-dollar agricultural economy across the valley. But
that bounty has come at a price. Overpumping of groundwater has
depleted aquifers, dried up household wells and degraded
ecosystems. The land is literally sinking…
The San Joaquin Valley has a big
hill to climb in reaching groundwater sustainability. Driven by
the need to keep using water to irrigate the nation’s breadbasket
while complying with California’s Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act, people throughout the valley are looking for
innovative and cost-effective ways to manage and use groundwater
more wisely. Here are three examples.
Groundwater provides about 40
percent of the water in California for urban, rural and
agricultural needs in typical years, and as much as 60 percent in
dry years when surface water supplies are low. But in many areas
of the state, groundwater is being extracted faster than it can
be replenished through natural or artificial means.
Across a sprawling corner of southern Tulare County snug against the Sierra Nevada, a bounty of navel oranges, grapes, pistachios, hay and other crops sprout from the loam and clay of the San Joaquin Valley. Groundwater helps keep these orchards, vineyards and fields vibrant and supports a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy across the valley. But that bounty has come at a price. Overpumping of groundwater has depleted aquifers, dried up household wells and degraded ecosystems.
The San Bernardino kangaroo rat and the Santa Ana River woolly
star thrive in areas with frequent flooding. But decades of
mining — and the construction of ditches, pipeline crossings,
levees and a bridge — had cut off water flow and made their
environment unlivable.
In the driest years for Monterey County, the water available in
the Salinas River is not enough to supply a single household.
In the wettest year of the past three decades, 1995, there were
100,000 acre-feet of water available, more than the total urban
usage in the county. Although the flow fluctuates wildly, the
average amount is far more than what is needed, for example,
for thirsty coastal cities desperate for housing. The water has
been available for decades – the right to use it is protected,
encouraged and even required by state law – but it’s been
flowing into the ocean, a casualty of Monterey County’s
political deadlock.
Six years ago, in the middle of a crippling drought,
Californians were ordered to let their lawns turn yellow. They
put buckets in their showers to conserve. Scofflaws had to
attend “drought school.” Meanwhile, farmers throughout the
Central Valley had to idle many of their fields. This week’s
deluge left many Californians shoveling snow and splashing
through puddles as an “atmospheric river” swept the state. More
precipitation is in the forecast for next week. But experts
worry that without repeated downpours over the next two months,
the painful memories of the last drought could become reality
again.
As climate change threatens a doubling of the impact of extreme
drought and fire within a generation, researchers are
uncovering the influence of human activity on both these
growing risks. One study has found that human numbers exposed
to the hazard of extreme drought are likely to double in
the decades to come, as global heating bakes away the
groundwater and limits annual snowfall.
As California farmers weigh decisions on what to plant and how
much, lack of rainfall so far this winter has further clouded a
2021 crop outlook already complicated by market uncertainties
created by the pandemic. With current precipitation levels
looking even drier than the 2014-15 drought years, Kings County
farmer Brian Medeiros said he’s already making decisions about
what ground to fallow.
Governor Newsom’s proposed budget includes funds for
agricultural programs designed to build climate resilience and
support farmers’ financial resilience and water security. We
talked to Karen Ross, secretary of the California
Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) about progress on
such programs, and what’s on the horizon.
The state’s new groundwater law has prompted a lot of dirt
movement in the Central Valley. The Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act passed in 2014 mandates that overdrafted water
basins get their aquifers in balance — don’t pump out more than
goes back in — by 2040. In order to get there without massive
farmland fallowing, most valley water managers have been adding
as many acres of recharge ground as possible. The
Delano-Earlimart Irrigation District has been particularly
aggressive.
A bid by Kern County farmers to take Kings River floodwater
officially got underway Tuesday as state regulators hashed out
procedures and next steps with the various parties. An initial
hearing had been set for April 15, but may now be pushed back
to July, depending on how Administrative Hearing Officer Nicole
Kuenzi rules.
The Santa Clarita Water Agency (SCV Water) is asking for the
public’s input on the Engineering Evaluation Cost Analysis
(EE/CA) of removing perchlorate and volatile substances from
the Saugus Formation Aquifer, officials said Tuesday. As
part of this effort, SCV Water is seeking input on the removal
of these substances during a 30-day public comment period from
Jan. 26 to Feb. 24, 2021, according to officials. The
public is invited to review and comment …
An expansion project [at Los Vaqueros Reservoir] started in
2010 and completed in 2012 raised the dam height 34 feet to 224
feet. It increased the storage capacity 60 percent to 160,000
square feet. It also expanded recreational uses and stepped up
habitat protection. The surface covers 1,400 acres and has an
elevation at capacity is 524 feet. Los Vaqueros is also
where the next significant increase in California reservoir
storage could be in place by 2028. The $915 million
project will raise the dam 55 feet to 273 feet. It would
increase storage from 160,000 acre feet to 275,000 acre feet.
As a resident of Marina and the president of the Board of
Directors of Marina Coast Water District, I feel it is very
important to correct inaccurate statements provided by former
Congressman Sam Farr. Yes, MCWD has needed to expend legal fees
in the past few years; however, the bulk of those fees are to
protect our precious water source from California American
Water. Cal Am seeks to construct a desalination plant that will
degrade our sole water supply source, groundwater… -Written by Jan Shriner, president of the Marina Coast
Water District board of directors.
More than 30 states actively regulate oil and gas development
with a variety of practices and rules designed to reduce
health, safety and environmental impacts. …
Colorado approved new, nation-leading well integrity rules
designed to prevent oil and gas wells from leaking methane to
the atmosphere, befouling groundwater resources and causing
explosions that can harm workers and communities.
The State Water Resources Control Board adopted a general order
for how wastewater is processed and discharged at winery
locations in an ongoing effort to safeguard groundwater and
surface water from wastewater discharges. The order protects
groundwater and surface water quality while giving wineries the
flexibility to select compliance methods that best fit their
site-specific situation, including tiering the compliance
requirements to the winery size and associated threat to water
quality.
The California Department of Conservation (DOC) today announced
five watershed coordinator grants totaling $1.5 million to
support regional sustainable groundwater management goals. The
grants will go to organizations around the state within medium-
and high-priority groundwater basins.
To help you learn more about the importance of groundwater, the
Water Education Foundation has an array of educational
materials on this vital resource. And next week, the
Foundation’s online magazine, Western Water news, will
publish a special report examining how two local groundwater
agencies are taking different approaches to achieve
sustainability in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the most
critically overdrafted regions in the state.
Madera County farmers are getting ready to play what could be
the “game” of their livelihoods. The county groundwater
sustainability agency will launch a groundwater market
simulation, or game, next month as a way for growers to see if
selling and trading their groundwater helps make the most of
what will become a severely limited resource in coming years.
The Colusa and Glenn Groundwater Authorities will host an
online workshop about a Well Monitoring Pilot Program the
agencies are implementing. The voluntary, non-regulatory
program will gather information about groundwater use in the
Colusa Subbasin while also providing participants with
near-real time access to information on well production and
groundwater levels at their wells, according to a press
release.
A booming agricultural industry in the state’s San Joaquin
Valley, combined with punishing droughts, led to the
over-extraction of water from aquifers. Like huge, empty water
bottles, the aquifers crumpled, a phenomenon geologists call
subsidence. By 1970, the land had sunk as much as 28
feet in the valley, with less-than-ideal consequences for
the humans and infrastructure above the aquifers. … All
over the world—from the Netherlands to Indonesia to Mexico
City—geology is conspiring with climate change to sink the
ground under humanity’s feet.
California is enveloped in balmy weather that’s more like
spring than mid-winter — and that’s not a good thing. We have
seen only scant rain and snow this winter, indicating that the
state may be experiencing one of its periodic droughts and
adding another layer of crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and
economic recession. The all-important Sierra snowpack,
California’s primary source of water, is scarcely half of what
is deemed a normal depth. -Written by Dan Walters, CalMatters columnist.
San Joaquin Valley farms and Southern California cities are
facing different but equally daunting water challenges.
For Valley farmers, the requirement to achieve groundwater
sustainability in coming years has heightened interest in
expanding water supplies to reduce the need to fallow irrigated
farmland. For Southern California, falling demands since the
early 2000s have reduced water stress during normal and wet
years, but a warming climate makes future droughts a major
concern. Both regions’ water futures could be more secure if
they jointly developed and managed some water supplies. -Written by Alvar Escriva-Bou, a research fellow at the
Public Policy Institute of California
While they remain hopeful the rest of winter will provide much
more rain and snow, water resources managers in the Sacramento
Valley are preparing for the potential for a dry year. While
the prospect of a dry year is always jarring and challenging,
we have confidence in the experience and knowledge that our
water resources managers gained in 2014-15, and the strategies
this region has implemented since that time to prepare for a
dry year.
If 2020 taught us anything, it is that ACWA member agencies are
highly skilled at delivering essential services to their
customers even during the most unexpected and unprecedented
times. As we gear up for the new year, our members continue to
impress with their collaborative and coordinated efforts on
vital issues affecting California water management, including
the implementation of additional long-term water use efficiency
strategies to increase resiliency in dry years.
On Jan. 15, State Assemblymembers Robert Rivas and Rudy Salas
introduced Assembly Bill 252, which if approved would help
alleviate the impacts of the Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act (SGMA) on farmers and ensure that farmland taken out of
production due to SGMA is reused to provide conservation,
recreation, or other benefits to local communities.
California’s Central Valley produces much of the nation’s food,
including about 40% of the country’s fruits and nuts and has
the nation’s second most pumped aquifer system. Its drier
southern portion, the San Joaquin Valley, has decreasing
surface water supply reliability due to frequent and prolonged
droughts, stricter environmental regulations, and growing
competition among water users. Many farmers pump groundwater to
provide their unsupplied water demand. The resulting
groundwater overdraft has numerous impacts on the Valley’s
agriculture and residents.
A study of groundwater that feeds public drinking water
supply finds pesticides in 41% of supply wells (and a handful
of freshwater springs). Two-thirds of that 41% contain
pesticide compounds per se, and one-third contain pesticide
degradates — compounds resulting from biotic (or abiotic)
transformation of pesticides into other compounds.
Arizona depends heavily on the Colorado River, and it is
over-allocated, meaning, we collectively take more water from
the system than nature puts in. To make matters worse, the
Colorado River basin has been experiencing a prolonged drought
of more than 20 years. When you take the longer term view,
a lot of communities in Arizona are heavily dependent on fossil
groundwater supplies. Once you pump them out, they’re gone
forever. There are real problems looming when it comes to
groundwater management and the Colorado River.
A national coalition of over 200 agricultural organizations and
urban and rural water districts urged President-elect Joe Biden
and congressional leadership to address aging Western water
infrastructure in any potential infrastructure or economic
recovery package. Kings River Conservation District was among
the organizations to sign on to the letter.
The building of dams on the Colorado River has forever changed
the ebb and flow, flooding, drying and renewal cycle of what
was once Lake Cahuilla, changing its character and changing its
name to the Salton Sea. Entrepreneurs once thought that the
Salton Sea would become a sportsman’s mecca, providing fishing,
boating, and waterskiing experiences like no other. There were
a few decades where that dream seemed to be true. Then it
wasn’t.
The stage is finally set for years of talking to be translated
into actual clean drinking water for potentially thousands of
San Joaquin Valley residents. But activists fear the effort
will flop before the curtain rises if more isn’t done to engage
the people who are drinking that water. The issue is nitrate,
which is rife the valley’s groundwater and considered
dangerous for infants and pregnant women.
Large swathes of land in densely populated parts of the world
are subsiding rapidly as a result of groundwater depletion.
Paired with rising sea levels caused by global warming, this
could place many coastal cities at risk of severe flooding by
2040.
The Governor’s proposal for how to spend California’s $15
billion surplus includes $60 million in direct grants to help
replenish groundwater in the valley’s most depleted basins. The
measure specifies the money is to be used in “critically
over-drafted basins,” which lie mostly in the San Joaquin
Valley. Water managers were pleasantly surprised, but not
overwhelmed, by the amount.
The South Tahoe Public Utility District is seeking input as
they update the groundwater management plan for the greater
South Lake Tahoe area. Groundwater is the primary source of
drinking water for more than 90% of the public and private
water systems located throughout this area. Seeking input from
beneficial uses and users of groundwater ensures the region’s
Groundwater Management Plan assess current groundwater
conditions, reflects local groundwater concerns and offers an
appropriate long-term management plan to ensure our community
has a sustainable source of clean water supply.
Vicky Espinoza is on a mission. Vicky is passionate about
making sure rural, low-income communities and small-scale
farmers have a say in land-use and water-management decisions
in the San Joaquin Valley.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Monday, as part
of a 12-state coalition, submitted comments to the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) arguing that its new
draft guidance misinterprets the U.S. Supreme Court’s
decision in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund… In
the comment letter, the coalition argues that the EPA’s draft
guidance tips the scales in favor of polluters by providing
them with additional arguments to avoid regulation under the
Clean Water Act, contravenes the purpose of the
Act, and conflicts with the Court’s decision
in County of Maui.
Borrego Springs’ only viable water source is a large aquifer
under Borrego Valley; it has long been accepted that the
aquifer’s water collected over millennia and is being pumped at
a rapid pace by recent generations. What farmers, developers,
business owners, and residents never agreed upon was how much
water was actually available, and how long it would last.
Did you know Ventura is one of the largest cities in Southern
California to rely solely on local water supplies? Rainfall
feeds the Ventura River, Lake Casitas, and local groundwater
basins to meet all the water needs of our community. Water
is at the core of our identity and the future of its security
is in jeopardy. Although our community’s conservation efforts
have reduced water use by 20%, Ventura’s rain-dependent water
supplies remain vulnerable to future droughts.
A dinosaur bone. The footprint of a woolly mammoth. An ancient
shell imprinted on a rock in your backyard. These are the
images the word “fossil” calls to mind. But, buried deep within
the earth, there’s another kind of fossil you might not expect
— ancient aquifers, created by rain and snow that fell more
than 10,000 years ago. And unless the fossil water stores are
better protected, scientists say, they may become a thing of
the past. New research on fossil water from Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory suggests that drinking wells that pump
fossil water can’t rely on it being replenished — especially
during times of drought.
An invisible flow of groundwater seeps into the ocean along
coastlines all over the world. Scientists have tended to
disregard its contributions to ocean chemistry, focusing on the
far greater volumes of water and dissolved material entering
the sea from rivers and streams, but a new study finds
groundwater discharge plays a more significant role than had
been thought.
In a letter to the city’s Hearing Officer, the Arroyo Seco
Foundation said it opposes plans by the Pasadena Water and
Power Department to upgrade facilities in the Upper Arroyo Seco
damaged by the 2009 Station Fire. Damage to the
structures has greatly reduced the city’s capacity to divert
water from the Arroyo Seco for spreading and pumping.
As North County water stakeholders wait for the state’s
approval of a 20-year Paso Robles Groundwater Basin
sustainability plan, the State Water Resources Control Board
recently expressed concerns about whether that plan does enough
to reverse the basin’s decline and protect domestic well users.
A cloud of uncertainty hangs over the Water Replenishment
District as staff, board members and the district’s attorneys
try to navigate a legal minefield created by controversial
attempts to hire former Carson Mayor Albert Robles as the
agency’s new general manager.
The EPA did issue a draft guidance memorandum relating to the
County of Maui decision, notice of which was published in the
Federal Register on December 10, 2020. However, instead of
clarifying the seven criteria stated by the Court in County of
Maui or the application of those criteria, the EPA took seven
and half pages to state three truisms and added an additional
criteria not stated in the Court’s decision bringing the total
number of factors to consider in determining whether a
discharge to ground water is the functional equivalent of a
discharge to navigable waters to eight.
The Visalia City Council’s last meeting was a fitting end to
2020 bringing news of an impending drought and the possibility
the city’s groundwater reaching a new low. At the Dec. 21
meeting, Visalia’s water resource manager Andrew Munn told the
council he was recommending the city move into Stage 2 of its
water conservation ordinance on March 1, 2021 and to move into
Stage 3 if the aquifer drops to a historic low.
The Friant Water Authority cleaned up some of the most
important work in the last month of the year hashing out a
legal settlement with farmers in southern Tulare County.
Represented by the Eastern Tule Groundwater Sustainability
Agency (GSA) farmers agreed to contribute at least $125 million
to repair the significant subsidence-caused sag in the
gravity-fed canal that has cut water deliveries by 60%.
A cloud of uncertainty hangs over the Water Replenishment
District as staff, board members and the district’s attorneys
try to navigate a legal minefield created by controversial
attempts to hire former Carson Mayor Albert Robles as the
agency’s new general manager.
The board of the Water Replenishment District rejected a
controversial proposal to hire former Carson Mayor Albert
Robles as its interim general manager in a stunning turn
when one of his supporters, and then another, left the meeting
without explanation.
On December 8, 2020, the United States Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) issued draft guidance intended to clarify when a
National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit
is required under the Clean Water Act (Act) based upon the
recent United States Supreme Court ruling in County of Maui v.
Hawaii Wildlife Fund (Maui). This guidance is important
for public agencies and other entities that make point source
discharges to groundwater that reach waters of the United
States.
Ametek Inc., a manufacturer of electronic instruments, has
agreed to pay $3.5 million to put to bed allegations that it
contaminated the groundwater of mobile home parks near a
California aerospace manufacturing plant it once operated. The
settlement, which received final approval from a California
federal judge Tuesday, will include $1.5 million for medical
consultations for the roughly 7,000-person class that says
their groundwater was contaminated with the toxic chemical
trichloroethylene, a solvent used in manufacturing.
San Luis Obispo County recently launched a project aimed at
developing a groundwater sustainability plan for the Arroyo
Grande Subbasin and is calling for community members with wells
that tap into the basin to help improve the county’s water
level data. The Arroyo Grande Subbasin consists of a seven-mile
stretch extending from the Lopez Dam to Highway 101 and was
established as its own entity in 2019.
Spend time in any of the world’s great forests and you’ll start
seeing the trees as immense pillars holding the heavens aloft
while firmly anchored in the earth. It’s as much fact as
sentiment. Trees really do link the ground to the sky by
exchanging energy and matter between the soil and the
atmosphere. Researchers believe that understanding this
connection could provide both a wealth of scientific insight
into ecosystems and practical applications that address
challenges such as water resource conservation and management.
Rising seas can evoke images of waves crashing into beachfront
property or a torrent of water rolling through downtown
streets. But there’s a lesser-known hazard of climate change
for those who live along shorelines the world over: freshwater
in the ground beneath them creeping slowly upward. For many Bay
Area residents who live near the water’s edge,
little-publicized research indicates the problem could start to
manifest in 10-15 years, particularly in low-lying communities
like those in Oakland, Alameda and Marin City.
In what was hailed as a “landmark agreement,” farmers in an
area of southern Tulare County blamed for sinking the
Friant-Kern Canal from excessive groundwater pumping will chip
in a hefty amount to help pay for a fix. How hefty could
be decided by their payment choice.
EPA’s recent draft guidance memorandum on applying the Supreme
Court’s decision in County of Maui v. Hawai’i Wildlife Fund
provides little clarity for determining when a release to
groundwater is the “functional equivalent” of a direct
discharge such that it requires an NPDES permit. Instead, the
guidance largely stresses how the Maui decision did not
fundamentally change permitting under the Clean Water
Act, while explaining how permit writers might consider
system design and performance in assessing functional
equivalence.
A new study highlights the tremendous impact groundwater has on
Arizona’s economy and underscores the need to make sure every
community has tools to protect and manage it far into the
future, said Todd Reeve, director of Business for Water
Stewardship (BWS), which commissioned the report.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published guidance on
how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in County of
Maui v. Hawai’i Wildlife Fund. The guidance provides some
clarity as to when a discharge to groundwater is the
“functional equivalent of a direct discharge from a point
source into navigable waters.”
The latest update to a video series detailing the impacts of
the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) has recently
been released. The bilingual SGMA video series is available on
the YouTube channel CaliWaterAg. The latest installment,
Part 1.4, addresses land repurposing related to SGMA.
California has yet to comprehensively deal with pervasive
chromium-6 contamination, but that may soon change. The
State Water Resources Control Board held public workshops this
week as it moves into what might be one of the final phases of
the process of regulating the contaminant. They looked
specifically at the costs of cleaning up the problem after the
board published more data and analysis of the extent of
chromium-6 contamination last week.
Arizona State University’s Seidman Research Institute and
Business For Water Stewardship released a new,
first-of-its-kind report estimating the economic importance of
groundwater for Arizona’s five Active Management Areas in
Phoenix, Pinal, Prescott, Santa Cruz and Tuscon. The report
finds that Arizona’s groundwater contributed to an annual
average of 43% of the state’s gross domestic product (GDP), or
$1.2 trillion to the economy over a period of nine years.
In the San Joaquin Valley, agricultural runoff from fertilizer
and manure leaches into groundwater, contributing to some of
the highest levels of nitrate pollution in community water
systems in the country. A new report shows Latino
neighborhoods are disproportionately impacted by elevated
levels of nitrate, which advocates say is a result of a
historic pattern of racist policies at every level of
government.
A research team has analyzed big data of more than 200,000
groundwater samples taken from across the state and found that
there are problems with the guidelines used for groundwater
management. Known as the ‘Base of Fresh Water’, the guidelines
are close to fifty years old and don’t reflect current uses,
knowledge, concerns or technologies related to managing
groundwater in this coastal state with a multi-billion-dollar
agricultural industry.
Southern Tulare County farmers inching toward a cliff of
groundwater restrictions that could dry up tens of thousands of
acres have joined with conservationists to potentially soften
their own landing and help improve wildlife habitat at the same
time. At least that’s the goal of the newly formed Tule Basin
and Water Conservation Trust.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday released a
draft guidance that interprets a Supreme Court decision in a
way that may exempt some facilities from needing permits to
pollute groundwater. The EPA’s new draft guidance says
that whether a pollution discharge into groundwater should be
considered a “functional equivalent” depends on “what happens
to the discharged pollutant over that time and distance
traveled” to the regulated body of water.
The Hopi have lived for thousands of years on the mesas of the
Colorado Plateau. Flowing springs and seeps have sustained
them, providing sources where they have collected drinking
water, grown corn and beans, and maintained a spiritual
connection to life-giving water. But the springs are
dwindling. Some are completely dry.
